Michael F. Flynn (1947-2023)

It is with much sadness that I report that Michael F. Flynn, well-known science fiction writer and longtime friend of this blog, has passed away.  Mike’s daughter made the announcement at his blog yesterday. 

That Mike will be remembered for his work in science fiction goes without saying.  But it is worth emphasizing too that he was an irreplaceable presence in the blogosphere, who showed the potential of the medium for work of substance and lasting value.  I doubt he ever posted anything that didn’t reward his readers’ attention, with writing that wore lightly Mike’s learning not only in the sciences but also in philosophy, theology, and history.  He was for many years a regular and welcome contributor to the comments section of this blog, raising the tone simply by virtue of his presence.  One of the things I most admired about him was the calm and patient manner with which he would respond to even the most obnoxious and ignorant interlocutors.  He never had to say that he knew what he was talking about, while his opponent didn’t.  He simply showed it by typing up a few sentences.

Aquinas on the will’s fixity after death

My essay “Aquinas on the Fixity of the Will After Death” appears in New Blackfriars.  (It’s behind a paywall, I’m afraid.)  Here’s the abstract:

Aquinas holds that after death, the human soul can no longer change its basic orientation either toward God or away from him.  He takes this to be knowable not only from divine revelation but by purely philosophical reasoning.  The heart of his position is that the basic orientation of an angelic will is fixed immediately after its creation, and that the human soul after death is relevantly like an angel.  This article expounds and defends Aquinas's position, paying special attention to the action theory underlying it.

Augustine on false community

In a new article at Postliberal Order, I discuss the perverse forms of human community identified and criticized by Augustine in the Confessions, and how what he has to say applies to our times.

The Death Penalty and Genesis 9:6: A Reply to Mastnjak (Guest article by Timothy Finlay)

Genesis 9:6 famously states: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image” (RSV). This has traditionally been understood by Jews and Christians alike as sanctioning capital punishment. In a recent article at Church Life Journal, Nathan Mastnjak has argued on grammatical grounds for an alternative reading of the passage, on which it does not support the death penalty. What follows is a guest article replying to Mastnjak by Timothy Finlay, who is Professor of Biblical Studies at Azusa Pacific University and a member of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew.

In his article, Nathan Mastnjak writes, “The translation ‘by a human shall that person’s blood be shed’ is not strictly impossible, but given the norms of Classical Hebrew grammar, it should be viewed as prima facie unlikely especially since there is a much more plausible translation that is contextually appropriate and grammatically mundane.” This has it completely backward. It is Mastnjak’s claim that the ב in Genesis 9:6 be construed as expressing price or exchange that, while not strictly impossible, flies in the face of Hebrew lexicons and grammars – in contrast to the standard translations (both Jewish and Christian) which are contextually and canonically appropriate and grammatically mundane.

Hartshorne on the project of natural theology

Process theism denies some of the key attributes ascribed to God by classical theism, such as immutability and impassibility.  Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) was among its chief representatives.  As a Thomist, I am the opposite of sympathetic to process theism.  However, I’ve always found Hartshorne an interesting thinker.  Many twentieth-century philosophers had a regrettable tendency toward overspecialization, and also often ignored all but a handful of thinkers of the past.  Hartshorne, by contrast, was a philosopher of the old-fashioned stripe.  He addressed a wide variety of philosophical problems, was deeply read in the history of philosophy, and that history informed his work on contemporary issues.  He was also old-fashioned insofar as his theism (flawed though it was from my point of view) was integral to his more general metaphysics and ethics.  Like the greatest thinkers of the past, Hartshorne knew that the question of God was at the very heart of philosophy, not something that could be ignored by any serious philosopher, or at best tacked on to an otherwise complete system.

Fastiggi on Capital Punishment and the Change to the Catechism, Part II

In 2018, Pope Francis authorized a revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which now states that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”  This might be read as implying that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong, which would contradict scripture and two thousand years of magisterial teaching.  As a result, the change has been criticized as at least badly formulated.  In a recent four-part series at Where Peter Is, theologian Robert Fastiggi criticizes the critics of the revision.  The first part of my response to Fastiggi addressed what he has to say about the obligations of Catholics vis-à-vis the Magisterium of the Church.  In this second part, I will address what he says about the teaching of scripture, the Fathers, and previous popes on the topic of capital punishment.

Fastiggi on Capital Punishment and the Change to the Catechism, Part I

In 2018, Pope Francis revised the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church dealing with the topic of capital punishment, so that it now states that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”  Flatly to assert that capital punishment is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” might be read as implying that the death penalty is intrinsically evil, or immoral of its very nature and not just under the wrong circumstances.  Such a claim would contradict scripture and two millennia of consistent magisterial teaching.  For this reason, the revision has been criticized as at least badly formulated, even by some Catholic thinkers who support the abolition of capital punishment.  For example, after the revision was announced, an appeal was made by forty-five prominent Catholic academics and clergy to the cardinals of the Catholic Church to call upon the pope clearly to reaffirm traditional teaching on the subject.

Aquinas and Nietzsche on the politics of envy

Recently, I joined Postliberal Order as a regular contributor.  Today, my essay “Against the Politics of Envy” appears at the site.  It discusses Aquinas’s account of the nature and effects of the sin of envy, Nietzsche’s account of the nature and effects of ressentiment, and how woke politics is clearly an expression of envious ressentiment as Aquinas and Nietzsche understand it.

All One in Christ on EWTN Bookmark

Some time back I was interviewed about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for EWTN Bookmark with Doug Keck.  The episode airs on Sunday, August 27 at 10 a.m. ET.  It encores on Monday, August 28 at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET, and on Saturday, September 2 at 9:30 a.m. ET.  Here’s the advert for the episode.

Haugeland on hylomorphism

In his essay “Ontological Supervenience” (in his anthology Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind), John Haugeland puts forward an unusual criticism of hylomorphism, essentially accusing it of being too parsimonious.  The standard objection to hylomorphism is that it posits more distinctions and entities than are necessary.  Haugeland suggests that it posits too few, thereby failing to capture all of reality.

Open-minded open thread

It’s time for an open thread.  So dust off those otherwise off-topic comments you’ve been aching to post.  Because from M.C. Escher to MC Hammer, from pick-up sticks to Kubrick flicks, from panpsychism to pan pizza, everything is now on-topic.  Just keep it civil and in good taste, as always.  Previous open threads archived here.

Stove and Searle on the rhetorical subversion of common sense

One of the stranger aspects of contemporary political and intellectual life is the frequency with which commentators put forward extremely dubious or even manifestly absurd claims as if they were obvious truths that no well-informed or decent person could deny.  Examples would be woke assertions to the effect that women have penises or that everything from professionalism to exercise to disliking body odor to getting a good night’s sleep is “racist.”  In his book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, David Stove characterized a similar rhetorical move sometimes made by philosophers as “reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism” (p. 142).

A comment on the Lofton affair

For any readers of my recent reply to Michael Lofton who have not been following events at Twitter and YouTube, Lofton has, over the course of the last few days, posted a series of tweets at the former and a series of videos at the latter strongly taking exception to my article.  I have to say that I am mystified at the number and vehemence of these responses.  But Lofton seems especially angry about my characterization of his initial video as “defamatory” and “libel.”  What follows are some brief remarks that I hope will put his mind at ease and allow us to move on from this affair.

Lofton’s YouTube straw man (Updated)

There’s a popular mode of online intellectual discourse that I rather dislike, which might be labeled “the extended YouTube hot take.”  It involves a talking head riffing, for an hour or so, on something someone has written on a complex philosophical or theological topic (an article, a book, a lecture, or whatever).  My impatience with this kind of thing is no doubt partly generational, but there is more to it than that.  The written form is more conducive to intellectual discipline.  A good article on a philosophical or theological topic, even when written for a popular rather than academic audience, requires the careful exposition of ideas and lines of argument, both the writer’s own and those of anyone he’s responding to.  It also has to be clearly written and well-organized.  You can’t achieve all this by simply pouring out on the page whatever pops into your stream of consciousness.  It takes time, and as a writer tries to whip a piece into shape, he’s likely to mull over the ideas and come to see flaws in interpretation and reasoning he would otherwise have overlooked.  A video, because it is so much quicker and easier to make, is for that very reason likelier to be of considerably lower intellectual quality. 

What is classical theism?

Recently, I was interviewed by John DeRosa for the Classical Theism Podcast.  The focus of our discussion is my essay “What is Classical Theism?,” which appears in the anthology Classical Theism: New Essays on the Metaphysics of God, edited by Jonathan Fuqua and Robert C. Koons.  We also address some other matters, such as the book on the soul that I’m currently working on.  You can listen to the interview here.

Archbishop Fernandez’s clarification

Recently, it was announced that Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernandez would become the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF).  As I noted in an article last week, Pope Francis has stated that he wants the DDF under the new prefect to operate in a “very different” way than it has in the past, when “possible doctrinal errors were pursued.”  The archbishop himself has said that he wants the DDF to pursue “dialogue” and to avoid “persecutions and condemnations” or “the imposition of a single way of thinking.”  He also indicated that he took this to mark a difference from the way the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (as the DDF was known until recently) has operated in recent decades.  As I argued in the article, the logical implication of the pope’s and archbishop’s words seemed to be that the DDF would largely no longer be exercising its traditional teaching function. 

Cardinal Newman, Archbishop Fernandez, and the “suspended Magisterium” thesis

St. John Henry Newman famously noted that during the Arian crisis, “the governing body of the Church came short” in fighting the heresy, and orthodoxy was preserved primarily by the laity.  “The Catholic people,” he says, “were the obstinate champions of Catholic truth, and the bishops were not.”  Even Pope Liberius temporarily caved in to pressure to accept an ambiguous formula and to condemn St. Athanasius, the great champion of orthodoxy.  Newman wrote:

The body of the Episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism… at one time the pope, at other times a patriarchal, metropolitan, or other great see, at other times general councils, said what they should not have said, or did what obscured and compromised revealed truth; while, on the other hand, it was the Christian people, who, under Providence, were the ecclesiastical strength of Athanasius, Hilary, Eusebius of Vercellae, and other great solitary confessors, who would have failed without them.

The vice of insensibility

Temperance or moderation is the virtue governing the enjoyment of sensory pleasures.  In particular, and as Aquinas says, “temperance is properly about pleasures of meat and drink and sexual pleasures.”  These pleasures reflect our bodily nature (which is why angels, unlike us, neither need the virtue of temperance nor exhibit the vices opposed to it).  Specifically, they reflect our needs for self-preservation and for preservation of the species.  Eating and drinking exist in order to meet the first need and sex exists in order to meet the second.  The pleasures associated with these activities exist in turn so that we will be drawn to carrying them out.  And temperance is needed so that the pleasures will perform that motivating task successfully.  In short, temperance exists in order that we will be drawn to the right kinds of sensory pleasures and to the right degree; those pleasures exist for the sake of encouraging eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse at the right times and in the right ways; and those actions exist, in turn, in order that the individual and species will carry on.

Pilkington responds

Philip Pilkington sent me a response to my reply to his American Postliberal article. I thank him for it and am happy to post it here:

Feser's response to my piece is a welcome effort at clarification. We need such clarification if postliberalism and related thought is to move from the abstract to the concrete. Here I will address the key points, as best I can.

Postliberalism, economics, and culture

I commend to you economist Philip Pilkington’s fine essay “Towards a Postliberal Political Economy,” at The American Postliberal.  It is in part a response to my recent Postliberal Order article “In Defense of Culture War.”  It seems to me that we are essentially in agreement, and that for the most part the essays complement rather than contradict one another.  But there might be some differences over details, or at least of emphasis.  Let’s take a look.

In defense of culture war

From Marxists on the left to former House Speaker Paul Ryan on the right, many voices in the political discussion assure us that the “culture war” is a distraction and that what matter most are economic issues.  But economic order has cultural prerequisites, and indeed economic phenomena themselves cannot even be conceptualized apart from cultural presuppositions.  I make the case for the priority of culture to economics in my essay “In Defense of Culture War,” which appears this week at Postliberal Order.

The associationist mindset

When Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers say that human beings are by nature rational animals, they don’t mean that human beings always reason logically (which, of course, is obviously not the case).  They mean that human beings by nature have the capacity for reason, unlike other animals.  Whether they exercise that capacity well is another question.  Human beings are often irrational, but you have to have the capacity for reason to be irrational.  A dog or a tree doesn’t even rise to the level of irrationality.  They are non-rational, not irrational.

Reconsidering corporal punishment

Debates about crime and punishment today typically concern disagreements about the death penalty, or about the length, and in some cases the appropriateness, of prison sentences.  Largely neglected is the topic of corporal punishment – the infliction of bodily pain as a penalty for an offense.  No doubt many will regard the very idea as a relic of a less enlightened age.  But that is not a view shared universally.  And the practice made headlines in the West within living memory, when, in 1994, the American teenager Michael Fay was caned in Singapore for vandalism (specifically, for stealing road signs and damaging a number of cars).

Hell and conditional prophecy

In a recent talk at the Angelicum (which can be viewed at YouTube), Fr. Simon Gaine addresses the question of whether scripture teaches that some will in fact be damned.  He notes that certain prophecies of Christ might seem to imply this, but suggests that they may plausibly be read as conditional prophecies rather than descriptions of what will in fact happen.  Let’s take a look at his argument.

Capital punishment and the law of nations

What is the nature of Pope Francis’s 2018 change to the Catechism’s teaching on capital punishment?  Does it amount to a reversal of traditional teaching?  A development of doctrine that is consistent with that teaching?  A prudential judgment?  And if the latter, is assent to the new formulation binding on the faithful?  Barrett Turner offers an important analysis in his Nova et Vetera article “Pope Francis and the Death Penalty: A Conditional Advance of Justice in the Law of Nations.”  Let’s take a look.

Substance, teleology, and intentionality

There is an illuminating parallel between the traditional Aristotelian distinction between substances, artifacts, and aggregates, and the distinction John Searle draws between intrinsic intentionality, derived intentionality, and as-if intentionality.  This might seem odd given that the Aristotelian distinction is concerned with very general questions about the metaphysics of physical objects, whereas Searle is concerned with a very specific topic in the philosophy of mind.  But on closer inspection the parallel is quite natural and obvious, and the connecting link is the notion of teleology.  Let’s first consider each distinction, and then we’ll be in a position to see the parallels.

A Festschrift for Gyula Klima

My essay “Truth as a Transcendental” appears in the Festschrift Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind: Essays in Honor of Gyula Klima, edited by Joshua P. Hochschild, Turner C. Nevitt, Adam Wood, and Gábor Borbély.  Gyula’s work has contributed mightily to the revival of interest in medieval and Scholastic philosophy, and this honor is most deserved and welcome!  You can check out the table of contents at Josh Hochschild’s Twitter feed or at the publisher’s website. 

The Catechism and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Annett

Some years back, in my article “Three questions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment,” I argued that Pope Francis’s statements on the death penalty cannot plausibly be read in a way that would make assent to them binding on Catholics.  This week, in an article at Where Peter Is, Tony Annett offers a reply.  Let’s take a look.

Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism

Right-wingers often characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinely dismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that reflects ignorance of Marxist theory.  Who is right?  In his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony argues that there is indeed a significant link between wokeism and Marxism.  Paul Gottfried responds at Chronicles, arguing that the similarities between the two have been overstated.  Let’s take a look at their arguments.

What is a Law of Nature?

Some time back I gave a lecture at Fermilab on the topic “What is a Law of Nature?”  I’ve posted the text of the lecture at my main website.  You can watch the video of the lecture either at the Fermilab website or at YouTube.

All One in Christ on EWTN Live

Recently I recorded an interview about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the television program EWTN Live with Fr. Mitch Pacwa.  The show airs today – at 5 pm Pacific time, again at 10:30 pm, and then tomorrow morning (Thursday) at 7 am.  The recording will be available for viewing later at the show’s website and at YouTube.

Talking philosophy and natural theology

Recently, on the Thomistic Institute’s Off-Campus Conversations program, Fr. Gregory Pine and I had a discussion about Aquinas’s Five Ways, their metaphysical presuppositions, and the moral and spiritual preconditions of doing philosophy well.  You can watch it at YouTube or listen to it at Soundcloud.

Strawson on free will and interpersonal relationships

In his classic paper “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson addresses the question of what difference the widespread acceptance of determinism would make to our everyday ways of dealing with each other.  He judges that our commonsense conception of human behavior is too deeply rooted in our nature to be dislodged even in such a scenario.  As in Strawson’s other work, he urges attention to details of ordinary experience that are ineliminable but often overlooked by revisionist systems of metaphysics.

All One in Christ on Bookmark Brief

Recently I recorded interviews about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the television programs EWTN Live and EWTN Bookmark.  They will be aired in the coming weeks, but a preview of the Bookmark interview has already appeared on Bookmark Brief with Doug Keck.  You can view it here.

McCaig and Reilly on All One in Christ

At Twitter, Bishop Scott McCaig kindly recommends my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory.  He writes:

A devastating critique of CRT and a clear Catholic response to the evils of racism.  A real eye-opener!  The incompatibility of CRT with the Faith, its numerous logical errors, and it’s deeper entrenching of racism into societal fabric could not be clearer.  Please read.

In the Winter issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Robert R. Reilly kindly reviews the book.  From the review:

Feser’s [book] is an important rejoinder, delivered in an accessible way for a wide audience, not just specialists and Catholics…

The philosophy of capital punishment

My essay “The Justice of Capital Punishment” appears in The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment, edited by Matthew C. Altman.  You can view the anthology’s table of contents and other information about it at the publisher’s website. 

Putnam on reason, reductionism, and relativism

Naturalism holds that what is real is what can be accounted for in terms acceptable to science.  More or less the orthodoxy in contemporary intellectual life, naturalism is a purportedly less crude descendent of what was traditionally known as materialism.  For the materialist, matter alone is real, so that anything that is both real and seems to be different from matter (mind, for example) must somehow really be material after all.  In modern times, matter is often conceived of on the model of particles in motion, so that “materialism” connotes the idea that everything real is really nothing but particles in motion. 

How to define “wokeness”

A common talking point among the woke is the claim that “woke” is just a term of abuse that has no clear meaning.  Whether many of them really believe this or are just obfuscating is not clear, but in any event it isn’t true.  I would suggest that what critics of wokeness have in mind is pretty obviously captured in the following definition: Wokeness is a paranoid delusional hyper-egalitarian mindset that tends to see oppression and injustice where they do not exist or greatly to exaggerate them where they do exist.

This month at First Things

My review of Thomas Ward’s superb new book Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus appears in the current issue of First Things.  I was recently interviewed by Mark Bauerlein for the First Things podcast about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory.

Naturalism versus Katz’s Platonism

Naturalism holds that there is nothing more to reality than the world of concrete entities causally related to one another within space and time.  Since this is the realm studied by the natural sciences (such as physics, chemistry, and biology), naturalism can also be characterized as the view that the subject matter of natural science is all that there is.  Naturalism thus denies the existence of God, of angelic intellects, of immaterial souls (whether conceived of along the lines of Descartes’ res cogitans or in some other way), and of Platonic Forms and other abstract objects.